51–60 of 99 posts
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Like selling drugs or "money laundering"? I don't think so.
I mean, there are lots of worse penalties for things related to organized crime. Things like minor fraud or burglary are often also in the probation bucket.
It sounds like this was a piece of software where you uploaded a PDF of “proof” that you had the authority to track anyone in America, and then it let you. And someone finally bothered to look at the proof and it was a blank page. This is why I’m against giving the government the power to intercept communications or middle-man encryption. They always pitch it like “This power will be protected by courts and warrants…
See also LOVEINT. Every once in a while, some NSA spy gets caught spying on their loved ones. Not even incompetence, just plain malice and abuse. Looks like they don't even face any criminal charges either. Governments are essentially adversaries, enemies we have to defend against. It must be mathematically impossible for them to abuse their power. Anything short of that is not enough.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
See also LOVEINT. Every once in a while, some NSA spy gets caught spying on their loved ones. Not even incompetence, just plain malice and abuse. Looks like they don't even face any criminal charges either. Governments are essentially adversaries, enemies we have to defend against. It must be mathematically impossible for them to abuse their power. Anything short of that is not enough.
That's just impossible. Even if everyone had perfect e2e encryption, the government could just ban it and throw people who use it in jail. You can't solve social problems with technology. What is necessary is a governmental system which tends away from the abuse of power. This requires better voting, more transparency, and the literacy and engagement of its citizens. The problem is, just like in Conway's game of life…
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People who are drunk on power subscribe to the "ask for forgiveness, not permission" philosophy. They think everything they do is right and just. They cannot understand or even believe people would not trust them and see the conditional as a pointless hindrance, bureaucratic red tape meant to stifle upstanding people like them.
People love to wield power over those they oppose and don't care if the system they implement is abused until they're the targets of the abuse. For example: most people love the police when they coercing wealth from strangers to fund their projects but hate when the same police step on their chest until they stop breathing during a traffic stop.
> when they coercing wealth from strangers to fund their projects
I have no idea what you're referencing here, so I can't say if it's abuse or not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
See also LOVEINT. Every once in a while, some NSA spy gets caught spying on their loved ones. Not even incompetence, just plain malice and abuse. Looks like they don't even face any criminal charges either. Governments are essentially adversaries, enemies we have to defend against. It must be mathematically impossible for them to abuse their power. Anything short of that is not enough.
> Anything short of that is not enough. I like that in spirit, but not as a practical standard. A major function of government is to prevent abuses of power. So I'm more inclined to shoot for overall minimization of abuse.
But they can still do this. If you want to know where someone is, instead of compelling devices or carriers to spy on everyone at all times, you attach a tracker to the suspect's vehicle, or assign an agent to follow them. That's more expensive -- which is the deterrent to abuse.
A bad cop doesn't have time to follow around their ex all day. They do have time to follow around the subject of an official investigation, because that's their job. Tracking devices cost money, so it limits the number of people who can be tracked at once and prevents mass surveillance.
The argument for compulsory backdoors is purely an efficiency case, but efficiency is less important than preventing abuse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
See also LOVEINT. Every once in a while, some NSA spy gets caught spying on their loved ones. Not even incompetence, just plain malice and abuse. Looks like they don't even face any criminal charges either. Governments are essentially adversaries, enemies we have to defend against. It must be mathematically impossible for them to abuse their power. Anything short of that is not enough.
Want mathematical assurance that your government won't abuse power against you? Either you have to be the government or you don't live in a society with a government. Abuse isn't so easily constrained. Try proactive regulations, vigilance, and strict punishments (not comprehensive). Best effort, but what else can you do?
Encryption is the common example. As far as anybody knows the government can't break e.g. AES. But they can still find out what's on your device because with a warrant they can install surveillance devices in your house to capture it when you enter your passphrase, then seize your device.
Which makes it possible but not easy, which limits the scope for abuse.
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> It doesn't depend on whether you have location enabled It's even better: the location can be enabled through a network initiated request. This is because A-GPS works "both ways". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GNSS#SUPL : SUPL Position Calculation Function (SPCF) lets the client or the server ask for the client’s location. As part of the FCC’s updated 911 requirements, where cell phones (with no set loc…
This is very interesting - thank you for sharing your knowledge. Any other related rererences - the tech that enables this sort of tracking?
It's everywhere in mobile devices. It's better not to use them.
If you must use one, you must at least have root to disable AGPS + add stringent iptable rules to disable any outgoing communication by default: you should only enable connections per app, or per IP/domain for what you need.
Still, that'll be of a limited help since the baseband manages connections (3GPP profiles etc) and does the equivalent of NAT to your device.
For all I know, the baseband could tell android "location disabled? sure thing!" while still getting GPS fixes + sending the position by UDP packets processed by the baseband OS: Android won't even see it! Yet by virtue of sharing the same IP (or being "enriched" with your IMSI as you can see above), you will be totally trackable.
Doing anything more requires running free software on the baseband: there're now free-software firmwares like https://github.com/the-modem-distro/pinephone_modem_sdk (I'll submit that for discussion)
It started from initiatives like https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/hflat0/pine... but now you even have a free software bootloader for the modem (see https://github.com/Biktorgj/quectel_lk)
If you want, you can also recover the stock firmware (https://github.com/Biktorgj/quectel_eg25_recovery), but the ability to audit from top to bottom to disable data exfiltration requires a 100% free software solution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anything short of that is not enough. I like that in spirit, but not as a practical standard. A major function of government is to prevent abuses of power. So I'm more inclined to shoot for overall minimization of abuse.
> A major function of government is to prevent abuses of power. But they can still do this. If you want to know where someone is, instead of compelling devices or carriers to spy on everyone at all times, you attach a tracker to the suspect's vehicle, or assign an agent to follow them. That's more expensive -- which is the deterrent to abuse. A bad cop doesn't have time to follow around their ex all day. They do have…
The "expense" involved in getting warrants approved is a better check on abuse, since it's very easy to do this as part of official law enforcement duties, and quite hard otherwise - the corrupt cop will need to come up with some reasonable justification, and not have it fall apart under deeper scrutiny. Of course if your local judge will rubber-stamp blank_document.docx as a proper "warrant" you have a problem again. But that can be addressed in turn.
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Yea I sometimes get a feeling that a large portion of the population just doesn’t understand conditionals. If you tell them “you have the authority to do X if Y”, they just ignore the Y part.
It's not about understanding, it's about seeing these sort of rules bent dozens of times first and then finally doing it yourself. Rules are only as strong as their enforcement and in many cases it turns out that no-one has neither the incentive nor the ability to enforce them very hard.
And then you have some hard rules like, investigations are automatically closed after the statute of limitations runs, or if the target of the investigation dies, or the victim chooses not to press charges etc. Things not in the control of the investigators, so they can't keep an investigation open forever to prevent their abuses from becoming public.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about understanding, it's about seeing these sort of rules bent dozens of times first and then finally doing it yourself. Rules are only as strong as their enforcement and in many cases it turns out that no-one has neither the incentive nor the ability to enforce them very hard.
One of the things that would help this if anytime any of these surveillance powers get used, they have to be used as part of a specific ongoing investigation, and when that investigation is closed, everything related to it becomes a matter of public record. And then you have some hard rules like, investigations are automatically closed after the statute of limitations runs, or if the target of the investigation dies,…